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Friday, August 17, 2012

The Orange Pickers

Parable of the Orange Treeby Dr. John White

I dreamed I drove on a Florida road, still and straight and empty.
On either side were groves of orange trees, so that as I turned to look at them
from time to time, line after line of trees stretched back endlessly from the
road—their boughs heavy with round yellow fruit. This was harvest time. My
wonder grew as the miles slipped by. How could the harvest be gathered?

Suddenly I realized that for all the hours I had driven (and
this was how I knew I must be dreaming) I had seen no other person. The groves
were empty of people. No other car had passed me. No houses were to be seen
beside the highway. I was alone in a forest of orange trees.

But at last I saw some orange pickers far from the highway,
almost on the horizon, lost in the vast wilderness of unpicked fruit. I could
discern a tiny group of them working steadily. I could not be sure, but I
suspected that the earth beneath me was shaking with silent laughter at the
hopelessness of their task. Yet the pickers went on picking.

The sun had long passed its zenith, and the shadows were
lengthening when, without any warning, I saw, as I turned a corner of the road,
a notice: “Leaving NEGLECTED COUNTY—EnteringHOMECOUNTY.”
The contrast was so startling that I scarcely had time to take in the notice. I
had to slow down, for all at once the traffic was heavy. People by the
thousands swarmed the road and crowded the sidewalks.

Even more startling was the transformation in the orange
groves. Orange groves were still there, and orange trees in abundance, but now,
far from being silent and empty, they were filled with the laughter and singing
of multitudes of people. Indeed it was the people we noticed rather than the
trees. People—and houses.

I parked the car at the roadside and mingled with the crowd.
Smart gowns, neat shoes, showy hats, expensive suits and starched shirts made
me a little conscious of my work clothes. Everyone seemed so fresh, and poised,
and happy.

“Is it a holiday?” I asked a well-dressed woman with whom I
fell in step.

She looked a little startled for a moment, and then her face
relaxed with a smile of gracious condescension.

“You’re a stranger, aren’t you?” she said, and before I
could reply, “This is Orange Day.”

She must have seen a puzzled look on my face, for she went
on, “It is so good to turn aside from one’s labors and pick oranges one day of
the week.”

“But don’t you pick oranges every day?” I asked her.

“One may pick oranges at any time,” she said. “We should
always be ready to pick oranges, but Orange Day is the day that we devote
especially to orange picking.”

I left her and made my way further into the trees. Almost
everyone was carrying a book bound beautifully in leather, and edged and
lettered in gold. I was able to discern on the edge of one of them the words,
“Orange Picker’s Manual.”

By and by I noticed around one of the orange trees seats had
been arranged, rising upward in tiers from the ground. The seats were almost
full—but as I approached the group, a smiling well-dressed gentleman shook my
hand and conducted me to a seat.

I could see a number of people there around the foot of the
orange tree. One of them was addressing all the people on the seats; and, just
as I got to my seat, everyone rose to his feet and began to sing. The man next
to me shared with me his song book. It was called “Songs of the Orange Groves.”

They sang for some time, and the song leader waved his arms
with a strange and frenzied abandon, and, in the intervals between the songs,
exhorted the people to sing more loudly.

I grew steadily more puzzled.

“When do we start to pick oranges?” I asked the man who had
loaned me his book.

“It’s not long now,” he told me. “We like to get everyone
warmed up first. Besides, we want to make the oranges feel at home.” I thought
he was joking—but his face was serious.

After a while a rather fat man took over from the song
leader, and after reading two sentences from his well-thumbed copy of the
Orange Picker’s Manual, began to make a speech. I wasn’t clear whether he was
addressing the people or the oranges.

I glanced behind me and saw a number of groups of people
similar to our own group gathering around an occasional tree and being
addressed by other fat men. Some of the trees had no one around them.

“Which trees do we pick from?” I asked the man beside me. He
did not seem to understand, so I pointed to the trees round about. “This is our
tree,” he said, pointing to the one we were gathered around.

“But there are too many of us to pick from just one tree,” I
protested. Why, there are more people than oranges!”

“But WE don’t pick oranges,” the man explained. “We haven’t
been called. That’s the Pastor Orange Picker’s job. We’re here to support him.
Besides, we haven’t been to college. You need to know how an orange thinks
before you can pick it successfully—orange psychology, you know. Most of these
folk here,” he went on, pointing to the congregation, “have never been to ManualSchool.”

“Manual school?” I whispered. “What’s that”? “It’s where
they go to study the Orange Picker’s Manual,” my informant went on. “It’s very
hard to understand. You need years of study before it makes sense.”

“I see,” I murmured. “I had no idea that picking oranges was
so difficult.”

The fat man at the front was still making his speech. His
face was red, and he appeared to be indignant about something. So far as I
could see there was rivalry with some of the other “orange-picking” groups. But
a moment later a glow came on his face.

“But we are not forsaken,” he said. “We have much to be
thankful for. Last week we saw THREE ORANGES BROUGHT INTO OUR BASKETS, and we
are now completely debt-free from the money we owed on the new cushion covers
that grace the seats you now sit on.”

“Isn’t it wonderful?” the man next to me murmured. I made no
reply. I felt that something must be profoundly wrong somewhere. All this
seemed to be a very round-about way of picking oranges.

The fat man was reaching a climax in his speech. The
atmosphere seemed tense. Then, with a very dramatic gesture, he reached two of
the oranges, plucked them from the branch, and placed them in the basket at his
feet. The applause was deafening.

“Do we start picking now?” I asked my informant.

“What in the world do you think we’re doing?” he hissed.
“What do you suppose this tremendous effort has been made for? There’s more
orange-picking talent in this group than in the rest of HomeCounty.
Thousands of dollars have been spent on the tree you’re looking at.

I apologized quickly. “I wasn’t being critical,” I said.
“And I’m sure the fat man must be a very good orange picker—but surely the rest
of us could try. After all, there are so many oranges that need picking. We’ve
all got a pair of hands, and we could read the Manual.”

“When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you’ll
realize that it’s not as simple as that,” he replied. “There isn’t time, for
one thing. We have our work to do, our families to care for, and our homes to
look after. We…”

But I wasn’t listening. Light was beginning to break on me.
Whatever these people were, they were not orange pickers. Orange picking was
just a form of entertainment for their weekends.

I tried one or two more of the groups around the trees. Not
all of them had such high academic standards for orange pickers. Some held classes
on orange picking. I tried to tell them of the trees I had seen in NeglectedCounty, but they seemed to have little
interest.

“We haven’t picked all the oranges here yet,” was their
usual reply.

The sun was almost setting in my dream. Growing tired of the
noise and activity all around me, I got into the car and began to drive back
along the road I had come. Soon all around me again were the vast and empty
orange groves.

But there were changes. Something had happened in my
absence. Everywhere, the ground was littered with fallen fruit. And as I
watched, it seemed that before my eyes the trees began to rain oranges. Many of
them lay rotting on the ground.

I felt there was something so strange about it all, and my
bewilderment grew as I thought of all the people in HomeCounty.
Then, booming through the trees, there came a voice which said, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers
are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth
laborers into his harvest.”

“Also I heard the
voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said
I, Here am I; send me. And he said, “Go…”